The Creare Group is one of the UK’s leading web digital marketing agencies for small to medium businesses (SMEs). Creare works to deliver an affordable digital presence that works as hard as possible for thousands of clients. Creare hosts thousands of websites and offers SEO solutions to many of these clients.

As Creare grew it needed a way to easily scale their server security. Having used Cloudflare at a previous company, Creare's lead developer approached Cloudflare about their Optimized Partner Program.

Improved Security

When Creare came to relaunch its brand at a high profile event, their website was hit by a DDOS attack capable of taking down the dedicated server that solely hosted the site. Thankfully, Creare was on Cloudflare's network and the attack was blocked.

Junade Ali, Creare’s lead developer, commented: “We wouldn’t have had the technology in house to mitigate the attack. We just routed it through Cloudflare and in less than half an hour the attack was mitigated.”

By using Cloudflare as an intermediary for SSL sites, Creare’s client websites to rapidly mitigate new SSL vulnerabilities. Cloudflare also provided a strong Web Application Firewall to prevent Layer 7 attacks against Creare’s servers and preventing spam bots from ever reaching Creare’s servers.

Boost to SEO

Creare observed that after it rolled out Cloudflare for various clients, SEO rankings for those clients’ websites was dramatically boosted because of the improved speed and sitewide secure SSL.

The SEO ranking improvements that Cloudflare were far more dramatic than any other on-page SEO performance technique Creare had attempted.

Performance Benefits

Creare found that by leveraging Cloudflare’s Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) it could deliver improved, rapid load speeds to its clients around the world. This allowed their small business clients to reach new markets by delivering their web pages faster, regardless of geographical location.

Moreover, Creare was able to benefit from Railgun™, Cloudflare’s dynamic content optimizer. The high rate of compression allowed Creare to dramatically improve the load speed of sites by caching previously uncacheable, highly dynamic Magento e-commerce sites.

3x

REDUCTION IN BANDWIDTH

for sites enabled with Cloudflare's Railgun™ technology.

Server statistics from Creare’s Railgun instance indicated that Creare was able to achieve a 3x reduction in the amount of bandwidth needed to transmit out of their datacenter on Railgun optimized sites.